That’s the case for me with Morton Salt’s amazing collaboration with the innovative rock band and music video producer OK Go.
The band is known for their fantastical, tightly choreographed videos, like the bizarre treadmill choreography in Here It Goes Again, a complex Rube Goldberg Machine in This Too Shall Pass, or the video for Upside Down & Inside Out that was choreographed and performed in zero gravity, on a specially equipped airliner from the Russian airline S7.
We just passed the seventh anniversary since OK Go released the video to their song The One Moment, which made history by turning 4.2 seconds of film into a full music video.
So, what’s so special about the video and the partnership? The best way to know is to just watch the video, linked below, but it’s also worth knowing the backstory to the video.
The point of the video was to show that a lot can happen, and a lot can change, in just a moment, which the band and Morton Salt used to encourage people to enact change in their lives and in the world.
The majority of the video happens in just 4.2 seconds, which you see at the beginning as a confusing mish-mash of paint explosions, but the band then stretches out the time by slowing down the film to varying speeds, allowing the viewer to see everything happening with total clarity. At that point, you can see that everything that happened in the video occurred with incredibly tight timing, down to two milliseconds.
The brains behind the video primarily belonged to singer Damien Kulash, who said he literally timed it all out using an Excel spreadsheet.
“I have this spreadsheet that is massive that I was working on for a month, and sometimes I would look at it and it would not be numbers anymore, it was just squiggles,” Kulash said at the time. There were times that my brain just cracked.” In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Kulash said, “Choreography just turns into math. Things have to be perfectly accurate two milliseconds apart and they have to be perfectly accurate two milliseconds apart after they’ve fallen from eight feet up in the air. So, you wind up with a lot, a lot, a lot of math.”
In addition to the timing of exploding saltshakers, watermelons and paint balls, the band members had to perform incredibly precise choreography. For example, in one scene a bandmember sings at precisely one-third normal speed, while flipping through a book of pictures so it creates an animation of a person singing the song. Simply put, it’s mindboggling, but it’s also one of my all-time favorite licensing collaborations because the video is really a call to action that encourages viewers to change the world in a positive way.
“We constructed a moment of total chaos and confusion, and then unraveled that moment, discovering the beauty, wonder, and structure within,” the band said at the time.
The innovative video also kicked off Morton Salt’s first-ever Masterbrand campaign in the company’s 168-year history. The campaign launch included a branded content series, a dedicated website, out-of-home activations and media investment across digital and social platforms.
The brand platform was illustrated by the Walk Her Walk mantra, inspired by the Morton Salt Girl. “Without a doubt, the Morton name is synonymous with salt,” said Christian Herrmann, the CEO at the time of Morton Salt, Inc. “But there is more to our story. Our next chapter is inspired by the unstoppable spirit of the Morton Salt Girl. She is a symbol of drive. Of endurance. Of acting regardless of obstacles. We want to embody her spirit to make a real, tangible difference in people’s lives in more ways than ever before. Every journey starts with a first step and we are excited to start to Walk Her Walk.”
Both the band and the company are from Chicago, and somehow the two parties met and, in as Kulash put it, decided to create a music video that incorporated the message Morton Salt was trying to convey.
“The song ‘The One Moment’ is about those moments in life when you are most alive, the moments that truly matter, the moments when everything changes. It’s the perfect song for Morton’s message about stepping up and making a difference,” said Kulash. “We shot the video in a single moment to bring this feeling to life. We want to show that a single moment can contain so much wonder, so much beauty, and so much change. We hope it helps inspire people to use their moments wisely.”
To develop The One Moment music video, OK Go created and interacted with more than 325 choreographed moments. Originally Kulash wanted to shoot the video in a single, uninterrupted shot, but it proved to be impossible, so the band and crew set up seven high-speed cameras to capture the action from different angles. Once the scenes were shot, the editors had to slow the footage down to different speeds to match the action and the music.
Also in the video, the team created ‘hot spots’ that viewers could click on to learn more about young innovators that Morton Salt was supporting through grants, all of whom working on projects to create positive change in the world.
For example, Adarsh Alphons, who was expelled from school at seven-years-old for drawing in class later created ProjectArt, to help kids get access to arts education, and Seth Maxwell created the Thirst Project to work on the global water crisis.
Altogether, the video and the various projects showed that both companies and individuals can take a moment to make a difference.
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